By H.L. Delaney

Removal to Grand Ronde and the Coast

When the fighting in the Rogue River country ended in 1856, the people who had survived it were gathered up and moved north from their homelands to two new reservations, one inland at Grand Ronde and one along the coast at what became Siletz. This is where the world the novel moves through came to rest, and where the written record thins to almost nothing.

The Rogue River Wars had run for roughly five years, from the first mining camps of the early 1850s to the last holdouts in the canyons of the lower river. By the middle of 1856 the fighting groups had come in, worn down by winter, hunger, and the weight of numbers against them. The war ended the way the volunteer companies and much of the settler population had wanted it to end, with the country cleared. What that clearing meant, in practice, was the removal of whole peoples from the land they had lived on for longer than there had been a United States.

Removal offered as protection

Joel Palmer, the Oregon superintendent of Indian affairs, had been working toward removal for several years before the last shots were fired. His design was to move the Native peoples of western Oregon onto reservations, partly to open their homelands to white settlement and partly to place the survivors beyond the reach of the volunteer companies, some of whom had called openly for extermination. It was removal offered as protection, and it carried that contradiction from the start. The same government that had failed to protect Native villages from dawn attacks now proposed to keep them alive by taking them away from everything they knew.

The peoples caught up in this came from many separate nations: the Takelma and the Shasta of the interior valleys, the Athabaskan-speaking bands of the lower Rogue and the coast, the Umpqua and the Molalla to the north, and the Kalapuya of the Willamette Valley, among others. They held separate territories, answered to their own leaders, and spoke languages that were often unintelligible to one another. Removal did not sort them by nation or by innocence. It gathered them by the simple fact that they were in the way of the settlement the Donation Land Claim Act was already handing out.

The marches north

Through 1856 the survivors were moved north, several thousand people drawn from many bands. Some went by boat, carried up the coast from Port Orford and the mouth of the Rogue. Many others went overland, on long marches from the interior valleys to the reservations, guarded by soldiers and driven on a schedule that did not bend for the sick or the old. The overland routes crossed hard country in bad seasons, and the people walked much of the way with what they could carry.

Accounts of these marches vary, and the record was kept by the men conducting the removal, not by the people enduring it. What the accounts agree on is that many died along the way, of cold, of hunger, of illness that moved through columns of exhausted people with no shelter and little food. Children and the elderly were the least able to survive the journey. The numbers that appear in the reports are estimates made by the agents and officers who filed them, and they cannot carry the full count of who was lost. What can be said plainly is that people died on the road who should not have been on the road at all, and that they died a long way from the rivers that had fed their families for generations.

Two reservations, many peoples

The two reservations the survivors were sent to were themselves new. The Coast Reservation had been set aside by the federal government along a long stretch of the central Oregon coast, and its administration came to center on the agency at Siletz. Grand Ronde lay inland, at the edge of the Willamette Valley where it meets the foothills of the Coast Range. Onto these two tracts the government gathered peoples who had sometimes been rivals, who spoke mutually unintelligible languages, and who now had to build a shared life under a single agency far from home.

The distances undid the way people had lived. The year on the Rogue had followed the salmon, the acorn harvest, the root prairies, and the fishing bars that families held as their most valuable ground. None of that could be carried to a new coast or a new valley. Rations issued by an agency replaced a fishery that had ordered the seasons. At Grand Ronde, where so many languages met on one reservation, Chinuk Wawa, the trade speech of the lower Columbia, grew into a common tongue that let people from different nations live and work together. That a shared language took root at all is a mark of how far from home these communities had been carried, and of the work they did to hold themselves together once they arrived.

The deadly early years

Removal did not end the dying. The first years on the reservations were, for many, a continuation of it. The ground was unfamiliar and often poorly suited to the crops the agents expected people to raise. Housing was inadequate, rations were short and sometimes spoiled, and promised supplies arrived late or not at all. Disease moved through crowded camps of people already weakened by war and by the journey. The winters were hard on communities that had lost their stored food, their fishing places, and the knowledge of the country that had always told them where to find what they needed.

The early reservation record is one of hunger, sickness, and death recorded in an agent's ledger. The people who survived the wars and the marches then had to survive the reservations, and in the first seasons many did not. Here again the counts in the reports are estimates, and they undercount what they claim to measure, because a bureaucracy short on food and supplies had every reason not to write the full toll of its own failures. What is beyond dispute is that the reservations of the late 1850s were places where a great many people died who had already survived everything the war could throw at them.

What the record kept

The removal produced a paper trail, but of a particular kind. It kept the names of the superintendents and the officers, the terms of the treaties, the dates of the executive orders that drew the reservation lines, and the running counts of Native people delivered from one place to another. The people themselves entered that record mostly as numbers, as bands and headcounts and ration rolls. One column kept the men who conducted the removal, with their names and their reports. The other column kept a quantity. That asymmetry is the same one that runs through the whole conquest, and it decides, at the moment of writing, whose life gets a name and whose gets a figure.

This is the erasure The Renegade Enos keeps returning to. The novel takes its title character through the same southern Oregon frontier that produced these removals, at the eye level of a man the record used while he was useful and discarded when he was not. Enos was the sort of mobile, multilingual go-between the whole frontier ran on, and his story closed on the coast the survivors were being carried away from, hanged by a mob at Port Orford around 1857 after a trial that acquitted him for lack of testimony. The record kept the fact of his hanging and lost the names of most of the people removed past that same coast. To read the removal honestly is to read the agents' reports against their own grain, to notice the marches they summarized in a line, the food they counted among the losses without saying what it was for, and the people they filed as a number.

The descendants of the peoples removed in 1856 are enrolled today in the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and the Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians. Both communities were terminated by federal policy in the 1950s and both later won restoration of their federal status, Siletz in 1977 and Grand Ronde in 1983. That these nations endured the war, the marches, the deadly early years, and a later attempt to end them on paper, and that they hold and tell their own history now, is a measure of their own resilience and not of anything the removal intended.

The Renegade Enos: Witness to the American West is a novel by H.L. Delaney, forthcoming from Basalt Sea Press, the conquest of the West at the eye level of the man it used and discarded. The removal is the far end of the war the book moves through. More documented history sits behind the book at The History Behind the Novel, and the war that led to it runs through The Rogue River Wars and Who Was Enos. Get launch news →

Sources & further reading

• Stephen Dow Beckham, Requiem for a People: The Rogue Indians and the Frontiersmen (University of Oklahoma Press, 1971).
• E. A. Schwartz, The Rogue River Indian War and Its Aftermath, 1850–1980 (University of Oklahoma Press, 1997).
• Nathan Douthit, Uncertain Encounters: Indians and Whites at Peace and War in Southern Oregon, 1820s–1860s (Oregon State University Press, 2002).
• "Grand Ronde Reservation" and "Coast Reservation," The Oregon Encyclopedia (Oregon Historical Society).
• Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde and Confederated Tribes of Siletz Indians, official tribal histories.